


Carousel

by orange_crushed



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, post-journey's end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-25
Updated: 2011-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-20 17:11:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The mirror maze. It's a relic of an older time; before the plastic alien cups and the glow-necklaces and Spongebob Squarepants inflated on a stick. It's a bit out of place. He can appreciate that. He stands closer and reads the sign.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Carousel

It is the kind of place he would have taken her. Fairy lights and popcorn and games and a petting zoo; belligerent teenagers sicking up behind the tilt-o-whirl after a dare. He lingers in the rows of prize vegetables and pets blue-ribbon rabbits through the mesh walls of their hutch. "Carrots," he says, encouragingly. "Wonderful stuff." He smells hay and cheap cologne and the tang of refrigeration working overtime against the heat. He eats soft-serve and plays the milk-bottle game and accidentally wins a massive teddy bear for a little girl with a pink cast on her foot. The oncoming storm signs the plaster in looping scrawl while her parents eye him suspiciously: THE DOCTOR SAYS GET WELL SOON. Everyone around him is happy, or sweaty and stuffed and broke from too much fun. Most are both.

It is the loneliest place in the world.

 

 

It's dusk and he is halfway back to his ship when he sees it, in a spot he hadn't noticed. Just off to the side, barely more than a trick of light in the corner of his eye. A looming glass box and a garish sign ringed in fat, old-fashioned lamps, fizzling and crackling with electricity. Moths burn away on the bare bulbs like scraps of paper. The mirror maze. It's a relic of an older time; before the plastic alien cups and the glow-necklaces and Spongebob Squarepants inflated on a stick. It's a bit out of place. He can appreciate that. He stands closer and reads the sign.

"Lots of things to look at, at the fair," says the ancient man in the ticket booth. He is hairy at the ears and eyebrows, and nowhere else. He barely looks up. "Fireworks and tigers and elephants." He's reading a book, a thick one with a handmade paper jacket. He licks his knotted finger and turns the page, serene despite the deafening, psychotic glee of piped-in calliope music and the distant sounds of darts exploding a series of balloons. It's possible he doesn't hear them at all. His eyes flicker above the pages and meet the Doctor's with startling clarity. "Only one thing at the fair makes you look at yourself."

"That might be." He looks up, squints against the glare. "And here it is."

"You going in?" the man asks. He is. The Doctor fishes the last ticket out of his pocket and hands it over. He slides through the turnstile and steps between the mirrors and then he is looking at a long wall of his double.

He looks for what feels like a very long time.

 

 

It's his face, but it isn't. The little lines and spots and hairs are backwards, left to left and right to right. But it turns when he turns and walks forward when he does. He circles and there are always more mirrors behind him, moving even when he isn't watching, vibrating slightly with his steps on the corrugated metal floor. He takes a left turn and then a right, and the man at his side walks with him- now fat and now thin, now small, now stretched to the ceiling. He leans forward and pulls a face, grins and goggles and scowls at himself, scrunches up his eyebrows and pulls on his ears. "Handsome fellow," he says, to nobody. To himself, if he was thinking about that. "Have I seen you before?" It's too loud in the corridor, vibrating off the glass. It's an empty sound. He stops smiling, just for a moment, and the face paused in front of his own is worn and sad and blank. There is only one of him after all, only this one, staring at himself in an empty hall.

This was a mistake.

He stands up, glances back the way he came. It's difficult to distinguish between the path and the mirrors, but there's an edge of light on the frame that gives away the route. He steps back, looks one more time at his twin image. And stops. Stares. He glances down at his own jacket front, brown pinstripes, and back up. But there's something off, something different. When his eyes meet their reflection, they blink. For a second everything is perfectly still, and then, impossibly, his reflection smirks. Out of synch.

"How?" he asks. Out of habit. He stretches his hand towards the glass, presses his palm to the flat surface. His double does the same, and the suit bunches at the elbow. The reflection tilts its head, curiously, sending a shudder up the Doctor's spine. Really, it's too eerie. He draws the sonic out of his breast pocket and the man in the mirror does the same. He fiddles with the settings and tries to determine a frequency, a video signal, maybe a perception filter. Someone is manipulating this, patching in a captured feed or just playing with a hologram setup. Nothing too complex, really. Advanced technology for a carnival, but it wouldn't be the first time he's been surprised by something stashed in the wrong place. He resonates the glass and his double winks and mugs. "Stop that," says the Doctor, examining the frame. "It's distracting." The man in the mirror is mouthing something at him. Words. The Doctor pauses and watches him, sonic still in midair.

 _I have shown you-_

"No," he says, with wonder. And fear. For a second, fear. "No."

 _-yourself._

He doesn't even think: he presses down on the setting that will shatter glass, and presses hard. The mirror vibrates and cracks and explodes into a billion tiny fragments. They scatter to the ground like snowflakes, covering the tops of his shoes and dusting the floor with silver. But there was another mirror behind it- a wall of them, a tunnel. It shimmers and bends with light. It's blinding. It extends about eight feet and turns to the side. He can't see the end of it. The calliope music is playing still, fainter now. He can hear it whistling down the hall. He ought to turn back. He ought to shatter all the mirrors behind him and walk through the empty frames, until he can feel the air on his face again and smell the cotton candy. Theoretically it wasn't curiosity that killed the cat: more likely it was blunt objects, poison, drowning, falls from high places. Electrocution, staircases, the plague. The character flaw of curiosity is only a catalyst. He looks to the side, towards the place where the exit ought to be, and sees himself looking back. It's still talking to him. Spelling it out in silence. It's smiling at him as it speaks.

 _The man who keeps running_ , it says.

The Doctor climbs through the mirror.

 

 

Everywhere he looks, everywhere he turns, there's flickers of movement, his face in the glass. There are mirrors tracking him at the sides and mirrors above him, starry and endless, mirrors underfoot. He can't tell what direction he's walking or how far he's gone- he walks in lockstep with himself, hundreds and thousands in either direction, like a wave of legs and arms and bobbing heads. The mouth of the tunnel disappeared long ago. The light of the sonic dips and bobs like a firefly, a million blue fireflies, a million unreal points on an unreal horizon. He's sweating in his collar. This was a trap.

There's movement in the mirror to his left- or to his right, right-left, left-right- something that doesn't match up. He follows it with his eyes, chases it down another twisting hallway that leads back into a wider hall, all mirrored, all disappearing and dissolving. Dizzying. He stands still for a moment with his eyes closed. When he opens them again, he's seven hundred years younger. He looks older; white hair and a lined face and fancy, old-fashioned clothes. He turns around and he's older again, now looking younger. Blonder. He looked good in that jacket. He looks down the row at himself, him-selves, all the things he used to be and sometimes can't help being, still. They flicker and dance and mimic him as he tilts his head, leans back, leans forward. The only sound is his own breathing, short and sharp and silent through the nose. They lift their hands and wave when he does. They say nothing. He is utterly alone. He closes his eyes. He opens them again. A million Doctors in brown pinstripe suits blink with exaggerated calm. But behind them- how to explain it, behind, a million miles away but as close as a reflection- behind them there's a sudden bright slash of color, a streak of yellow in the black. A woman tossing her hair. The Doctor puts his hands to the glass, as if he could peer inside. He can almost make out the outline of a shoulder, the curve of a hip, just past the edge of the frame. He spins around and checks the other mirrors for a sign- there. Golden yellow against peach skin, the flap of a jacket, the tilt of a hip. Disappearing.

He chases the glimpse down the next hall. And the next. But there's a force tugging him back, away. The path dead-ends. He breaks a mirror and climbs through it, into a narrow corridor of frames that are older, dirtier, smudged with handprints and lipstick, dented and worn. He breaks another mirror and the ones beyond it are scuffed and cracked, trash piling up between them, papers and flyers and hair ribbons. Signs of life. Signs of death. He finds the air heavier, thicker, harder to inhale. He sits down for a second, just a second, to catch some breath in his lungs. His lids and his limbs feel heavy, wooden, leaden, sinking towards the floor. Towards the yellowing newsprint and the old jean jackets and burger wrappers, down and down, into sleep.

He curls up on the floor, dust in his hair and his eyes. The sonic slips out of his grip, tumbles under the scraps. He doesn't mind. It doesn't matter, not really. There is nothing to fight here, nobody to stop. Nothing to win, to prove. No reason to keep running. There is a mirror in front of him, where he lies on the floor: his own face stares back, pillowed in trash, looking grey and lined. It's getting dimmer here, darkening at the edges, making it difficult to see. He reaches out weakly to trace the edge of the mirror, to match his fingertips to his reflection's. The last bit of contact, the last touch-

-and his thumb snags on the edge of the glass, breaks and bleeds and stings, and the Doctor wakes up.

"No, no no," he says. Because somebody is listening. Somebody is here. "No, you don't." He digs in the scraps for the sonic and finds it, holds it tight. He resonates the mirror, but instead of shattering, it shimmers. There's a distortion in the glass, an interruption in whatever feed it's giving off, but it doesn't break. He tries another, and another. There's a dozen mirrors circling him; they shudder and waver like holograms, but stay tight in their frames. "A cell," he says. "A center- a heart." He tries a higher frequency, with no result. Until something behind him cracks. He turns around and sees a thin split running through the center of one of the mirrors. Only one. He follows it down the dirtied surface, examining the edges. And then- "Oh," he says. It echoes.

It's there, on the surface of the glass. It looks as if it was written in marker a long time ago, in a scrawling hand; aimlessly scribbled letters and symbols on the glass, coloring in hearts over a boyfriend's name, drawing arrows and smiley faces and dirty words and farewells. The whole thing's been scrubbed and colored over and scratched out. Only seven letters are left. It's the only thing that's still legible in a tangle of old loves and old hates and _I was here_. He traces his finger along their muddled paths, reading by touch in the dark. It's like following a vein.

B A D W O L F

He presses his forehead to the mirror. "Thank you," he says. The glass is cold against his skin, but not freezing. It's like touching the window in spring; feeling the departing chill and the promise in the air. He closes his eyes. He can almost- no. It's just a wish. _Rose,_ he thinks. It's a good word. He breathes in, feels the surface beneath his lips mist over. It's only a name. But it mattered to the witches, and it mattered to the beast, and it matters to him. She's alive and well somewhere, whole, without him. They all are. She's not alone. And he-

"Rose," he says, out loud. "I still believe."

The other mirrors tremble in their frames.

He aims the sonic at the mirror- marked and waiting- and presses the button. The glass shatters around him, first that mirror and then the rest, exploding in a circle and snapping some invisible tether. He's blinded in the spray. It doesn't hurt. It's like being inside light. Inside the place where it bends and breaks and scatters through space, the fluorescent edge of burning stars and the collapse that happens after. It's a long way down.

And then he finds he's lying on a sticky metal floor, with his jacket sleeve pressed tight against his face. He sits up and blinks away the glare, the pulse in his head. Everything aches. It feels like he's been crying. Above his head, only steps away, there's an exit sign held up by fraying wires.

It's blinking on and off.

 

 

It's morning when he finally stumbles out of the exit, leaping down the rickety steps and putting distance between himself and the glass. The sun's high and the sky is a pale, milky blue. There is nobody in the booth, nobody anywhere that he can see. The carnival's deserted. There are ragged flags flapping in the breeze, creaking joints in the ferris wheel cars; but otherwise, silence. He stands in the dirt in front of the maze and stares up at it, at the ancient bulbs and peeling painted sides, for the first time really seeing it. He inhales, and taste the cotton candy on his tongue. Faint and sweet. Now fading.

"Twelve hours," says the old man, from behind him. "I'm impressed." The Doctor whirls around, only to find him leaning casually on a worn cane, the book tucked under his arm. He looks better than he did the night before. Much better. There are wrinkles receding, age spots fading back into glowing skin. Fine white hair has sprung up on his scalp. His back is straighter. "I only got a taste of you. But what a taste. Enough to grow my hair. Most people get lost in the mirror room, it takes a week or two. And it barely soothes my aching knees." He sighs. "Ah, well."

"This is wrong," the Doctor says. His voice shakes with fury. "This stops, now."

"I prefer to do things the modern way," the old man continues, mildly. He bares his teeth. The tips are pointed. "But I can be old-fashioned, if you like."

"You feed on people," he says. "Their minds- their _souls_."

"It fills me up," the old man says. "And they get emptier. I'm just accelerating an inevitability. Sooner or later, this species always recognizes the truth." He rubs his thumb across the spine of his book. "You are all alone. You, most of all. I haven't tasted one like you since-" he stops, and smiles slightly. "You must be the last."

"I am."

"A terrible burden," the man sighs. "So why keep running? I'll make it quick for you. Quick and painless."

"I keep running," says the Doctor, "because running is good." He smiles and puts his hands in his pockets. "I'll even give you a head start."

"What-"

"Ten," he says. "Nine. Eight."


End file.
